I’ve posted a rendering of the discourse we will be starting with on Tuesday, The Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, the Shorter Discourse to the monk Malunkya. If you have the time to read it before class, please do so; we will read it in class – the discourses were meant to be heard, and they still, I believe, carry most meaning when they are read aloud. But reading the discourse in advance may give you a head start on questions you might want to ask.

Like many suttas, the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta has a richness of texture: we get a vivid picture of the two old monks—the Buddha and his elderly disciple, probably an old friend, almost certainly a cousin or an uncle in one way or another, whose foibles, impatience, old-man irritability, the Buddha had probably known for a good part of his life. We see those qualities in the old monk, and we see the Buddha’s ironic humor, as he draws out the analogy of the man shot by the arrow to Monty Pythonesque threads of detail; we also see, perhaps, a flash of irritation, and we can wonder how many times has Malunkyaputta put these questions to the Teacher.

Most importantly, though, we get some idea of how the Buddha limited the magisterium of the spiritual tradition he founded. Our society is saddled with competing monotheistic traditions, each of which asserts a comprehensive magisterium—the right to speak with final authority over a wide range of issues, including, most painfully for the conduct of a civil society, the nature of the universe, the fact of evolution, the nature and function of the law courts, the proper conduct of marriage and other life passages. The Buddha, in this discourse, placed a good deal of that matter into the realm of the Undeclared, and asserted quite forcefully that if a person following his teachings wished to save his life and sanity, he would focus on those things that the Buddha has declared—dukkha, craving, the cessation of craving, and the path to that cessation.

I will be teaching two courses at the University of Cincinnati’s Osher Lifelong Learning Center in the Fall (October/November) and the Winter (January/February) quarters. One will be a somewhat updated and revised version of a course I’ve taught before, on The Teachings of the Buddha; the other will be a new course on The Noble Eightfold Path. I’ve posted a syllabus for each class; here are the times, dates, and places for each class, each quarter:

• Syllabus: The Teachings of the Buddha
• Fall Quarter: 10/4/2010 through 12/3/2010
• Day: Friday
• Time: 2:00 PM – 3:25 PM
• Location: Raymond Walters Campus
• Note: There will be no class 11/26, the day after Thanksgiving; we will adjust the syllabus accordingly.
• Winter Quarter: 1/8/2011 through 3/11/2011
• Day: Tuesday
• Time: 9:00-10:25 AM
• Location: Adath Israel Temple (on Ridge Road, at the Northeast corner of Ridge and Galbraith)
• Syllabus: The Noble Eightfold Path
• Fall Quarter: 10/4/2010 through 12/3/2010
• Day: Thursday
• Time 3:35 PM – 5:00 PM
• Location: Raymond Walters Campus
• Note: There will be no class 11/11, Veterans Day, and 11/25, Thanksgiving Day; if people are interested, I will schedule one make-up session the week of 12/5. I will adjust the syllabus as the schedule requires.
• Winter Quarter: 1/8/2011 through 3/11/2011
• Day: Thursday
• Time: 9:00-10:25 AM
• Location: Adath Israel Temple (on Ridge Road, at the Northeast corner of Ridge and Galbraith)

I’m also hoping to teach the course on the Noble Eightfold Path over a ten-week period December 2010—February 2011. That course would be free, and the current plan is to hold it on Wednesday evenings, 7:00—9:00PM, in a classroom at Jewish Hospital in Kenwood. I’ll post details here as our plans cohere. If you’d like to receive an email notification when the plans are set, please send me an email.

Up until this time, this site has had its primary purpose as a support site for the classes I’ve taught at the University of Cincinnati’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. I’ll be teaching those again next winter, and they will follow closely (although there will certainly be changes) the syllabi published for this year’s courses:

• The Teachings of the Buddha
• Important Topics in Mainstream Buddhism

The site has been hosted in the dharmastudy.net domain. I am in the process of trying, once again, to establish a network of Dharma Study Centers, and I’ve decided to use the umbrella name Dharma Study Network (earlier versions of the idea used the term “New Dharma Center”, which Stephen Batchelor has convinced me is misleading and misled). So I’ve commandeered the dharmastudy.net domain for the Wiki in which that idea will find expression.

At the same time, since I won’t be teaching again for another year, and since I have lots of things I’ve written and plan to write about the study of the Buddhadharma, I decided to move these writings to the dharmastudy.org domain and work it as a more standard blog site.

So, for those of you interested in following along, replace any bookmark that linked this site to dharmastudy.net and replace it with one to http://dharmastudy.org. And if you want to make sure you don’t miss anything, subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, which will be updated every time there’s a new post. I hope to keep everything here moving along at a fairly spritely pace, with one or two posts per week; I’d welcome your comments.

Thursday’s session will be our last class; Joan and I are going out to California a week from Wednesday to spend some time with our grandson and his parents, and I’ll miss the last scheduled session.

Throughout the course, as we’ve looked at the various topics that Buddhist scholars, historians, practitioners and teachers tend to spend most time discussing and working to understand, we’ve used, almost as our exclusive source for the core teachings regarding those topics, the discourses recorded in the Pali Canon. On Thursday, we’ll look at just what that is: what texts compose the canon, how they were chosen, how they were recorded, their relation to other Buddhist texts, and where they fit into the various traditions that define Buddhism today.

Unlike some of the other topics we’ve discussed, this one is not particularly challenging intellectually (although I do think that it’s enormously interesting, and important to an understanding of the sort of thing that Buddhism is). What I hope we’ll be able to do is make relatively short work of reviewing the basics, which I’ve covered in a relatively short essay I wrote several years ago, have revised several times since, and is now posted on our Dharma Study website. Then we’ll use the bulk of the class for a more general discussion, in which we can air some of the questions that have arisen through the past six weeks, and review what we’ve learned and where we hope to go with that.

I look forward to seeing you on Thursday.

Since we missed our session Tuesday, we’re going to try to play a little catch-up this coming week. And that means that we’re going to alter how we’ve been conducting our classes.

Rather than my reading a sutta for discussion in class, I’d like for you to have read three suttas in preparation for Tuesday’s session, attentively enough so that we can discuss them without having to review the details of their content extensively in class.

• The Dighajanu Sutta is the one that was to have been the subject for Session 4; in it, the Buddha gives a Dhamma to a wealthy, commercially successful, and pretty self-satisfied householder—a Dhamma that will lead to his continued success in the world and to the realization of the fruits of that success, but which also leads naturally into a path of behavior that will insure his happiness and spiritual well-being now and in the future. I’ve posted a commentary on the Dighajanu Sutta, calling out the elements in it that I think are particularly important to our emerging understanding of the Buddha’s Teachings.
• In the Canki Sutta, the Buddha is again talking to a member of the Brahmin caste—not a householder, like Sigala, but a student, and a particularly precocious one at that. You might think of Kapatika as a sophomore at the University of Chicago, majoring in Economics and maintaining a 4.0 average. Kapatika engages the Buddha in argument, in a particularly sophomoric and hostile way, and the Buddha responds with patience, restraint, a good bit of irony, and just a touch of satire (watch for the line of blind men. He teaches Kapatika the difference between asserting that a particular view is the only view that’s true, and asserting that one believes a particular view to be the only true one. In the latter case, one “preserves truth”. He then goes on to teach Kapatika how one “discovers truth”, by embarking on a systematic, clear-eyed search for an honest and accomplished teacher and following the path recommended by that teacher, and how one “arrives at truth” by perfecting the practice of the chosen path.
• The Kalama Sutta is one of the best known suttas in the Pali Canon; in it, the Buddha teaches the householders of the Kalama tribe’s market town of Kesaputa how to evaluate the various claims and counterclaims of the teachers that pass through their town. There are no extrinsic guarantees of truth, the Buddha teaches. One must subject all teachings to the harsh test of direct experience. Of particular interest in this sutta is the final portion, in which the Buddha gives what amounts to a reverse twist to Pascal’s Wager. Whether or not there is some reward awaiting one who behaves well, it’s still a good thing to do so, conducing to one’s happiness and well-being here and now.

Please find the time to read the suttas before class; none are particularly difficult, and the middle one is the only one that gets rather long (even that is not outrageously long, and it’s possible to skim the repetitive parts.) If your interest is piqued, follow the links to other translations that may help you to understand some of the finer doctrinal points.

All of the teachings in the three suttas deal with practical issues: how to behave in ways that help increase your chances of finding success and happiness in the world; how to speak honestly; how to seek the truth in a way that insures that you won’t be taken in by someone who’s following a hidden agenda or pretending to knowledge that he doesn’t actually have.

I look forward to our discussion.

One of the most significant changes that was accelerating in Northern India through the course of the Buddha’s life is the development of trade and the rise of an increasingly powerful merchant class. That development increased the net wealth of the region, and the increasing wealth meant more taxes for the reigning kings, which enabled them to consolidate power, raise armies, and, eventually, subordinate the representative republics that had been, up until then, the dominant form of government in the region. With disciplined armies under effective central control, the kings were also able to bring a measure of law and order to the roads and trade routes of the region, which had always been dangerous routes to follow – if the tigers didn’t get you, the highwaymen would. And safer trade routes, in turn, led to further increases in trade, more rich merchants, and even more taxes for the king.

Another consequence of increasing wealth was that almost everyone had some excess, with which they could support the Buddha’s growing sangha. In a poor region, or a declining economy, living as a bhikkhu – i.e. living on alms freely given by the householders in a region – would not have been a particularly viable option. But the Buddha’s sangha of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis were, apparently, able to get along quite well on the largesse of a newly and increasingly wealthy laity. Indeed, many of the Buddha’s retreat communities – the areas where the sangha gathered during the three months of the rainy season – had been donated to the Buddha and his sangha by wealthy urban merchants. (Anathapindika is perhaps the best-known of these lay followers; he purchased a large park-like grove from Prince Jeta of Kosala, near the Kosalan capital city of Savatthi, and donated that the the sangha. The Buddha spent about 25 consecutive rains retreats in Anathapindika’s park.)

One reason that the Buddha’s teachings appealed so strongly to the rising urban middle class was that those teachings were eminently practical, rooted in the Buddha’s keen understanding of the way his lay followers lived, their responsibilities and their needs. Another is that the teachings involved nothing in the way of ritual, and no particular need to involve Brahmin priests in the process of gaining either success in the world or a fortunate rebirth in the next life. According to the Buddha, all those good results were rooted, quite definitely and intelligibly, in one’s own actions. To those who were used to working hard and getting what they wanted and needed by their own intelligent and diligent action, that was a message they could relate to.

The sutta we will discuss on Tuesday is a good demonstration of the Buddha’s ability to connect with the newly wealthy urban class. The teaching is delivered in what is identified as “the market town of the Koliyans”, one of a string of market towns between Savatthi, the capital city of the kingdom of Kosala, and Rajagraha, the capital city of the kingdom of Maghada; the Buddha’s home town of Kapilavattu was probably another one of those market towns. The Koliyans and the Sakyans were cousins, and the Buddha’s mother and stepmother were both Koliyans. The Koliyans and the Sakyans were frequently in dispute regarding rights to the water of the Rohini river which separated the republics; the Buddha was called upon on several occasions to act as peacemaker in those disputes, since he had gained the trust of both branches of the family.

The Buddha’s questioner in this sutta was known as Dighajanu, which mean’s “long shins”, and his family name was Vyagghapajja, which means “tiger’s path”. Dighajanu asks the Buddha for a Dhamma for people like him, with lots of family responsibilities and a life full of pleasures that he is not likely to give up to become a dropout like the members of the Buddha’s sangha.

The Dhamma that the Buddha teaches Dighajanu is simple, wise and accessible. It demonstrates that the Buddha was very much in touch with the life that Dighajanu led, and was in no way condemnatory of that life. But, as the Buddha almost always did, he goes on, after answering Dighajanu’s question about how to live in a way that guarantees happiness in his daily life, to give him some very brief additional teachings about how to live in ways that guarantee the preservation of that happiness in the future.

Briefly, the Buddha mentions four attainments – four fortunate accomplishments – that will produce that guarantee; saddha-sampada, the accomplishment of faith, sila-sampada, the accomplishment of virtue, cāga-sampada, the accomplishment of generosity, and pañña-sampada, the accomplishment of wisdom. Each of those receives its own extensive exposition in other teachings; faith, virtue, generosity and wisdom are essential accomplishments in the development of the Buddha’s path. Here each one is presented telegraphically, almost aphoristically, but still in a way that is easily understood and easy to grasp intuitively. The sutta concludes, as many suttas do, with a brief verse summary of the teachings presented.

I’ve given my own rendering of the Dighajanu sutta, which we’ll use as the basis for our discussion. In the introduction to that rendering, I’ve linked to two translations of the sutta, each more complete and authoritative than my rendering; I’d recommend that you read them all to get a feel for the full import of this brief but important teaching.

At Integral Options Café, a very fine Buddhist website, there is a good review of a new book on Mindfulness as a way of dealing with everyday difficulty. I think you might find it interesting in light of the brief mindfulness meditations with which we’ve been opening our class sessions.

Class Notes, Session 2

Session 2 is the only session in which both the Topics course and the Teachings course will be dealing with the same subject—the Buddha’s first Discourse, Turning the Wheel of the Law, The Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta. We’ll take a different approach to that Discourse in each class, sufficiently different, I would hope, so that those who are in both courses will not be bored or find the two classes repetitive.

In the Teachings class, we’ll look at the events leading up to Gotama Siddhatta’s Awakening as the Buddha, his formulation of his enlightenment experience as the Dhamma—the set of regularities and fundamental principles that determine how processes and events emerge from precedent conditions; essentially, the “natural law” that governs not only events in the physical world but also the course of our human lives and the progress of our well-being. We will then focus our attention on how that Dhamma was articulated in this first teaching and how it must have been received by its audience, the five monks, all born into the Brahmin caste, who had been Siddhatta’s companions during the period when he was practicing a path of austerity and extreme renunciation.

In the Topics class, we’ll cover those same subjects much more telegraphically, and then spend much of our time looking into the philosophical implications of the truths enunciated by the Buddha; we’ll look in more detail at the multiple ways in which he applied the concept of a “Middle Way”, and we’ll examine in some detail the particulars of the Eightfold Path.

Prior to both classes, it would be good if you could find the time to read two documents:

• The Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta itself, both the rendering I have supplied, and the more literal translations that are linked to from that document. This is, after all, the most fundamental text in Buddhism, and it would be a good idea to see how different translators have handled some of the difficult technical terms it introduces.
• An essay I wrote some time ago, borrowing extensively from material on Access to Insight, on the Buddha’s Early Life and Development. Essentially, the events covered in this essay take us from Siddhatta’s birth right up to the point at which he is ready to deliver the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta.

For the Topics course, I’d also recommend that you take a look at a precîs I prepared of a long piece by Bhikkhu Bodhi on the subject of the Eightfold Path. The original is on Access to Insight; there’s a link to the original in the precîs if you want the whole story.

Another superb resource, especially for those of you with mp3 players (iPods or the like), is the strong selection of talks by Stephen Batchelor at DharmaSeed.org. Stephen has visited Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center in Marin County every other year since 2005, and all of his seminar talks are available from that site. I attended the retreat he led this past November, and it was a thrilling experience. In particular relation to the topics we discussed this past week and that we will be discussing this coming week, I recommend talks #1, #2, and #3 from the 2007 retreat. Go to this page; if you just want to listen on the computer, you can click on the “Stream” button; if you want to download the audio file to your computer for transfer to your player, right-click on the “Download” button.

One fundamental thing about the Buddha’s teachings is that they are rooted in the world; in words that are repeated many times in the texts, those who follow the Path realized by the Buddha will come to enlightenment “right here and right now.” And because those teachings, like everything else we experience in the normal course of events, are contingent upon the conditions and circumstances from which they emerged, it helps, in understanding the teachings, to understand (however dimly we might understand across a gulf of half a planet and 2500 years of time) the place and the culture into which Siddhattha Gotama was born and in which he delivered the discourses through which we know him.

I’ve created and compiled a set of maps that can help us with that understanding; the maps will be useful in both courses, and it would be good to print them out, especially the second one—the political map—and bring the printed map(s) to class with you.

The Buddha. There is no longer any doubt among scholars and historians that the Buddha was an historical figure who was born among the Sakyan people of Northern India about 2500 years ago. He was the son of a powerful and wealthy leader of the Sakyans, a member of the Gotama clan; his given name was Siddhattha and he was known as Siddhattha Gotama. All of the evidence indicates that he was uncommonly intelligent and well-educated, with a charismatic personality. At the age of 29, dissatisfied with the transient nature of human life and the inability of even great wealth and power to deliver lasting happiness, Siddhattha left home and accepted the discipline of a renunciant wanderer; for the next six years he traveled on foot through northern India, studying with some of the finest teachers of his time, learning the techniques of yoga, living on alms, practicing severe austerities, and developing the meditative method that would form the basis of the practice he came to teach.

At the age of 35, sitting in meditation under a fig tree close to the village of Bodh Gaya, near the modern city of Rajgir, Siddhattha achieved the enlightenment he had been seeking: he came to an understanding of how things unfold in this world, and especially how the inescapable impermanence of the world is experienced as pain and distress, and how a person can live and train the mind to reduce or end that experience of pain.

With the attainment of that direct and powerfully experienced insight, Siddhattha became “The Buddha”, a term meaning “Enlightened One” or “Awakened One”. For several weeks following the experience, the Buddha contemplated the implications of his insight and developed his Dharma, his formulation of the truth that he’d come to understand about the world and the human condition. He then proceeded, over the next 45 years, to teach that Dharma to a growing community of male and female followers, disciplined, loyal, and self-reliant.